Police abuse of trafficking victims weakens fragile help system

Tonya Chaffee, a pediatrician who works with at-risk teenagers, some of whom are sex-trafficking victims, at San Francisco General Hospital says, “A lot of kids at risk have a history of abuse, of unstable housing. A huge driver for all of this trafficking is poverty.”

Tonya Chaffee, a pediatrician who works with at-risk teenagers,...

The girls are 16 and 17 years old. Sometimes as young as 10. They’re brought into juvenile hall wearing miniskirts and crop tops in the middle of February. Or they show up at an urgent-care clinic with three different sexually transmitted infections, or for their second pregnancy test in two months.

Stacey Katz, executive director of WestCoast Children’s Clinic in Oakland, knows that they are victims of sex trafficking, even if the girls don’t always say it. Their traffickers are men they call their boyfriends. Their abusers — their so-called clients — may be relatives, school counselors, lawyers. Sometimes, they’re cops.

Her thoughts are echoed at agencies throughout the Bay Area that work with sexually exploited youth. This kind of abuse — inflicted by those who should represent a first line of protection — undermines a fragile system that seeks to get them safely off the streets, trafficking experts say.

Outreach challenging

Already it’s profoundly challenging working with these kids, who may not even perceive themselves as victims. They tend to have endured traumatic childhoods, sometimes bouncing in and out of foster homes and suffering physical or sexual abuse from caretakers. They’re often dealing with poverty, as well as mental health and substance abuse problems on top of, or related to, the exploitation.

Efforts to help them are hampered by a cultural paradigm that shames victims and quietly allows their exploitation, Katz said. It’s a system that implies it’s OK to pursue sex with a woman when she’s 18, even if she was an exploited child a few months earlier.

Photo: Courtesy KGO-TV

A teenager who was sexually exploited by Bay Area police officers, and who goes by the name Celeste Guap, is pictured speaking to KGO-TV.

A teenager who was sexually exploited by Bay Area police officers,...

‘Moral responsibility’

That behavior is unacceptable among law enforcement officers, said Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley, who is investigating cops in the county linked to allegations made by the 18-year-old woman who goes by her online alias of Celeste Guap.

Some officers already have quit, and others may be fired or brought up on charges. But what’s happening is more than just a legal problem or police scandal, O’Malley said.

“It isn’t just talking about the laws, it’s also talking about the moral responsibility of people who are in power, who have authority, to not be the exploiters,” O’Malley said. “They’re supposed to be the protectors, not the exploiters.”

Guap, a Richmond resident who now works as a prostitute, has said in interviews that she knows what was done to her in the past two years was wrong, but she’s been hesitant to describe herself as a victim or express much outrage.

“I guess they did take advantage,” she said in an interview with The Chronicle, “but I guess it was harmless.”

Her attitude is typical, said counselors who work with exploited teens. That’s part of why it can be so tough to identify trafficked girls and help them break away from the people taking advantage of them.

For decades, most people thought of sex trafficking as something that happened to girls and women who were taken from other countries and forced into prostitution in the United States. Or if domestic girls were involved, they were kidnapped off the streets and imprisoned until police came to save them.

Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

Dr. Tonya Chaffee, director of the Teen and Young Adult Health Center at S.F. General Hospital, helped put together a federal report on youth sex trafficking.

Dr. Tonya Chaffee, director of the Teen and Young Adult Health...

Abuse in neighborhood

Those scenarios do occur, experts say. But far more often, trafficking happens by subtle force or coercion as young people — usually girls, but sometimes boys, too — are exploited in their own neighborhoods, either by strangers or people they thought they could trust.

“A lot of kids at risk have a history of abuse, of unstable housing. A huge driver for all of this trafficking is poverty,” said Dr. Tonya Chaffee, director of the Teen and Young Adult Health Center at San Francisco General Hospital, who helped put together a federal report on youth sex trafficking for the Institute of Medicine. “It’s a hugely vulnerable population. You’re talking about young people who have no power to do anything.”

At WestCoast Children’s Clinic, counselors created a behavioral health program tailored for victims of sex trafficking in 2009. They had five clients the first year; they see more than 100 a year now.

Don’t see exploitation

Increasingly, counselors found themselves working with girls in their late teens who did not realize they were being exploited. What was especially alarming, counselors said, was that in many cases the exploitation had gone on for years, sometimes starting when girls were just 10 or 11.

“We have clients whose first johns were counselors in school or group homes,” said Adela Rodarte, who runs a WestCoast program to connect young clients to mental health services. “And that sets the stage for everyone else abusing her. It clouds her judgment of what is appropriate and what is not.”

By the time these girls got help — perhaps after they’d been picked up by police and taken to juvenile hall, or referred by an attentive teacher or foster parent — they’d been enveloped in a lifestyle of trafficking for years. Some girls had grown to see their trafficker as a caretaker — someone who provided them with food, clothes, gifts and attention.

One young woman Rodarte worked with was in her early 20s before she recognized she’d been exploited as a teenager. It was only after she saw someone trying to exploit her little sister, who was 11, that the woman suddenly understood.

“She’s just a baby,” the woman realized, according to Rodarte. And then: “Wait, that was me. Someone did this to me.”

Hard to earn trust

Counselors working with girls who have been exploited for years have learned they need to tread carefully, Rodarte said. The girls often don’t trust adults. They may not want to leave their abuser. Even if they’re ready to leave, they may feel scared or hopeless. Some are ashamed.

Caseworkers like Rodarte often spend months building trust with clients. They will meet them for appointments in the middle of the night. They’ll meet them at school, in a car parked a few blocks from their house, or at a McDonald’s two towns away where they won’t be caught.

“They’re testing you out. They’ve been failed before,” Rodarte said. “Then they’ll realize, ‘Wow, this lady is coming back. She’s not asking for anything in return, I don’t have to do anything for her, and she’s coming back.’”

Last year, WestCoast began testing a screening tool to help identify victims early — ideally, before they’ve been exploited at all. The tool is a series of more than 50 identifiers that can be used by counselors, teachers, law enforcement officers and health care providers who come into contact with at-risk youth.

Among the questions: Is the young person dressed appropriately for the weather? Has she been asked to lie about her age or where she lives? Does she have expensive gadgets or clothes and no job or parents supporting her?

In pilot programs at 56 sites in California, almost 6,000 young people ages 10 to 21 were screened over a year. All of them were considered vulnerable, and many were in foster care or unstable housing. Twelve percent — 710 children — came up as very likely victims of exploitation. Among girls, the results were more dramatic, with 1 in 5 flagged as likely victims of trafficking.

Follow-up testing found that the test was accurate almost 90 percent of the time.

“I hope in the long run that we get better at identifying these kids much, much younger,” said Molly Brown, director of programs at Huckleberry Youth Programs in San Francisco. “By the time they get to 18, 19, 20, it’s a much different story. Helping them requires a lot more patience, and our system doesn’t have a lot of patience.”

The Celeste Guap case

Finding victims early can save them from years of trauma, Katz said. Exploitation, especially over many years, can lead to long-term physical and emotional distress. In particular, girls who grow up as victims of trafficking can lose their sense of worth and struggle to form close relationships, Katz said.

“You’re talking about ruining kids’ sense of selves and the world around them,” Katz said. “The real trauma and the real healing is in relationships that can restore that sense of self.”

The trafficking victims that Chaffee treats are “probably my most challenging patients,” she said. “But they’re also, for me, people I can really help.”

Putting an end to child exploitation and sex trafficking is going to take more than screening tools and specialized intervention, Katz said. As evidenced by the laundry list of accusations against Bay Area police officers, what’s needed is a “cultural shift,” she said.

‘Problem is systemic’

One potential step in that direction is a bill working its way through the state Legislature that would decriminalize prostitution for minors, meaning children under age 18 could not be arrested. That could reduce the stigma young people may attach to being exploited and raise awareness that these girls are victims, not criminals. But it’s just a start, Katz said.

“If you’re going to be exploited by police, by people who are supposed to rescue or save you or intervene on your behalf, then the problem is systemic,” she said. “We still get males that say, ‘How old are they?’ and ‘How were they dressed?’

“I think a cultural shift will happen. I don’t believe that we’re just going to abide while our girls are exploited,” Katz added. “But how long will it take? When will there be a critical mass of people who say, ‘Not now, not ever. Not my daughters, not my sisters, not my friends?’ It should have happened already.”